Students from UC Berkeley and local high schools got hands-on experience building and operating drones at the UC Richmond Field Station last week. The inaugural four-day “Multi-Drone Optimization Challenge” was hosted by the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory and Berkeley Drone Technologies as part of the Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP). The challenge guided students through the engineering life cycle of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems, covering topics ranging from autonomous flight systems to advanced sensing.
The Richmond Field Station (RFS) is a research facility of the University of California, Berkeley located in Richmond, California in the South Shoreline neighborhood of Richmond, just north of Albany and west/south of I-580, approximately 15 minutes away from the main campus in Berkeley.
The Challenge
Working in teams, students assembled, programmed, and tested their drones. The workshop culminated in a “speed-up of mapping” challenge within Richmond Field Station’s airspace, encompassing:
- Each participant builds and programs a (large) drone from a preassigned kit
- Each participant maps an area with their drone (RFS Drone Fields)
- Teams then combine their drones to assess the speed-up gained by the multi-drone system mapping gain vs. a single drone
- The participants ascertain the trade-off economics of multi-drone deployments
The Enabling Role of RFS
RFS maintains an FAA-Recognized Identification Area (FRIA) status, currently the only such location in the Bay Area. The FRIA status denotes a defined geographic area where UAVs may be operated without Remote ID (“aerial license plates”) equipment. This is particularly useful for student, academic and industry researchers with drones undergoing development that lack broadcasting capabilities during the initial design phase. See FAA FRIA Locations Map.
The Event
This event (M-DOC) was a direct government-academia partnership between the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory and the Berkeley Drone Technologies research group, in collaboration with UAVs@Berkeley, the premier drone student club at UC Berkeley (UCB). M-DOC equipment support was provided by STOP FIRES CEO and UC Berkeley alum, Jack Russi. The Berkeley Drone Technologies research group provided core curriculum, and the UC Berkeley College of Engineering and RFS leadership provided access to the Richmond Field Station.
The following coordinators designed and executed the workshop, providing hands-on mentorship and framing the technical challenges with real-world applications or close analogs, such as “mapping, search and rescue” in degraded, denied, intermittent or latent (DDIL) bandwidth network contexts:
- UCB/Berkeley Drone Technologies Coordinator: Tarek Zohdi
- US Army Coordinator: Peter Khooshabehadeh
- Collaborators: Basil Cleveland (Berkeley Drones) and Joey Gottbrath (SOAR)
- Student Team Supervisor: John Lomax, UAVs@Berkeley
- RFS Logistics: Sunny Quintana and Manuel Ordonez
Workshop Goals
The overall goal of the workshop was to expose students to a wide range of aspects of drone technologies spanning:
- Fundamental research: aerodynamics, structural analysis, propulsion, acoustics, thermal analysis, etc.
- Simulation: machine-learning, artificial intelligence, digital-twins, cameras, LiDAR imaging, onboard computing, etc.
- Applications: societal, industrial or commercial, agricultural mapping, fire-fighting, defense, manufacturing, etc.
- Controls: sensing, data acquisition, communications, autonomy, navigation, power-supply, etc.
- Manufacturing: fabrication methods, 3D-printing, cost-analysis, scale-up, etc.
- Education: pedagogy, training paradigms, literacy, access, outreach, etc.
